After a fresh, 64-bit installation of Fedora 13, you still have a bit of work to do to get things working as effectively as you’d probably like. Here’s my list of post-installation tweaks and twiddles! Naturally, since some of them refer to external sites/repositories, there’s no guarantee these things will work much after the time of writing!
1. Change your yum repositories
Yum has a ‘mirrorlist’ capability, whereby it dynamically works out which are the fastest and geographically closest update repositories to use when performing software installations or upgrades. These updates can be huge, however, and might make a hefty dent in your monthly download allowance. (If you’re on a 200GB plan, you probably don’t have to worry about it!) If, in addition, your ISP -like mine- makes available an unlimited, unmetered file mirror then the last thing you want yum to do is to make its own decisions about which update servers to use! Instead, you want to tell it precisely and unambiguously, ‘Use this one!’ and have that be the end of the matter. To do that:
su - root gedit /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo
Alter the line:
#baseurl=http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/...
…so that it contains the address of your unmetered server. In my case, that means the line becomes:
#baseurl=http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/fedora/...
Repeat that so that all references to the original software source are similarly replaced. There should be three such replacements to perform. When that’s done, make sure that the hash signs that start each of the ‘baseurl’ lines is removed. That means the line is un-commented and thus functional. Finally, add a hash sign to the start of each line that currently reads “mirrorlist=”: it’s the mirrorlist which lets yum choose a server dynamically, so you want that commented out so that only the ‘baseurl’ line is in effect.
Once you’ve edited fedora.repo in this way, repeat exactly the same edits for the file fedora-updates.repo.
Once both files have been altered and saved, issue the command:
yum -y update
…and about 500MB of software updates (at the time of writing) will be pulled down from your unmetered source and installed: no monthly bandwidth was harmed in the making of this update!
2. Install Google Chrome
Firefox is a good browser -but I think Google Chrome is better. Unfortunately, Chrome is not part of the standard Fedora repositories, but Google makes it east enough to install anyway. First, visit this page: http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html and select to download the “64 bit .rpm (For Fedora/openSUSE)” package. Save the download somewhere (the Desktop is good!).
Once, it’s downloaded, issue the following commands in a terminal window:
su - root cd /wherever/you/saved/the/file/to rpm -ivh google-chrome-stable_current_x86_64.rpm
You may get some errors displayed at this point along these lines:
error: Failed dependencies: lsb >= 3.2 is needed by google-chrome-stable-6.0.472.55-58392.x86_64
Simply “yum install” any dependencies noted, by issuing the command:
yum install lsb
Once any dependencies are installed, re-try the “rpm -ivh” command once more and it should run without incident. (Incidentally, this is the reason I suggest doing the installation from the command line. If you simply right-click the downloaded Chrome package and ask to ‘open with Package Installer’, you may well (as I did) simply see nothing happen: the error happens and is not ‘notified’ to you. Only when I tried the manual installation in the terminal did the nature of the error reveal itself).
You should have a new browser installed on your system (available from Applications -> Internet). Run it for the first time and it will offer to make itself the default browser (and to import Firefox settings, which probably isn’t worth doing at this stage).
3. Get Flash working
Flash is a pain in the neck (as Steve Jobs could tell you!) It’s closed source… and there’s now no 64-bit version (even in alpha state), thanks to Adobe withdrawing its old 64-bit alpha earlier in the year. Still, we live in an imperfect world -and I don’t want to be without BBC videos or Youtube. It is necessary, therefore, to have Flash -and to get it working on a 64-bit OS even when it’s not designed to. Here’s how you go about that:
- Visit http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/
- Download the ‘YUM for Linux’ version of the Flash Player
- Select to ‘install with package manager’. This just creates an adobe YUM repository so that the next set of commands will work correctly.
- Become root (su – root)
- yum install flash-plugin nspluginwrapper.x86_64 nspluginwrapper.i686 alsa-plugins-pulseaudio.i686 libcurl.i686
If all has gone according to plan, you should be able to view videos on the BBC website and play anything you like on YouTube, at least in Firefox.
You probably won’t be able to do the same in Google Chrome (but check it out, just in case you got lucky!). Instead, you’ll probably get ‘cannot play media’ errors on the BBC and ‘you need to upgrade your Adobe Flash Player’ errors on YouTube.
To fix those, just issue these command (as root):
cd /opt/google/chrome mkdir plugins ln -s /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins-wrapped/nswrapper_32_64.libflashplayer.so /opt/google/chrome/plugins/nswrapper_32_64.libflashplayer.so
That looks a little long-winded, but you’re simply making a link in the new Chrome plugins directory to the Firefox Flash plugin files so Chrome knows where to find them. Once that’s done, you can simply restart Chrome and Flash playback in that browser should now be fine. Roll on a proper 64-bit Flash plugin for both browsers, though!!
4. Multimedia Support
Fedora favours the use of free codecs, so things like FLAC and OGG are supported ‘out of the box’ -which is almost fine, because they both give you all the lossless and lossy audio encoding you could want. But if you’ve got any MP3s (I have a handful), you’ll need to do the following:
su - root rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm yum -y install gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-ffmpeg gstreamer-plugins-ugly
That also gives you lots of other multimedia formats, not all of them audio ones, such as x264 -and also the ability to rip and play commercial DVDs.
5. Configure Auto-login
It’s not to everyone’s taste, and I wouldn’t recommend it in a production/work setting, but at home I would prefer not to have to log on to my own PC: I have a lock on the study door if I want to keep out undesirables (or cats or partners). To set up auto-login for Fedora, do the following:
gedit /etc/gdm/custom.conf
The daemon section needs to end up looking like this:
[daemon] AutomaticLogin=hjr AutomaticLoginEnable=true
Replace “hjr” with something appropriate to your own circumstances, of course! Next time you reboot, you should end up at your desktop without any manual intervention on your part at all!